From: Dmytro Ivakhnenko
Message: 4480
Date: 2015-11-27
Dear Pali friends,
To ascertain how to transcribe 'Saṁyutta' in Ukrainian and Russian, I would like to know the most reliable version of its niggahīta ancient pronunciation.
Charles Duroiselle wrote:
"ŋ, (niggahīta), found always at the end of words is, in Burma, pronounced like 'm' in, jam, ram; in Ceylon, it is given the sound of 'ng' in, bring, king"
A Practical Grammar of the Pāli Language
http://dhamma.ru/paali/durois/paligram.pdf
I have read in Wikipedia:
"In Vedic Sanskrit, the anusvāra (lit. "after-sound") is a sound that occurs as an allophone of /m/ — at a morpheme boundary — or /n/ — morpheme-internally—, if they are preceded by a vowel and followed by a fricative (/ś/, /ṣ/, /s/ or /h/).
First, the anusvāra began to be used before /r/ under certain conditions, then in Classical Sanskrit its use had extended before /l/ and /y/, replacing earlier [l̃] and [ỹ]."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anusvara
Does this signify that pronunciation on Sri Lanka (Ceylon) has undergone influence from Classical Sanskrit, while Myanmar (Burma) preserved an earlier form?
E. Miller writes in his "Simplified Grammar of the Pali Language":
"Before a 'y' the anusvāra can remain, or the whole group can migrate into 'ññ', as e.g. saṁyoga or saññoga."
https://books.google.com/books?id=yxbHMM5sfpAC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20
https://archive.org/details/simplifiedgramma00mulliala
What does this imply for ancient pronunciation?
Metta,
Dmytro